Healthcare venture capital: Is China leading in healthcare technology?
AI will really be the next big thing, and it’s really going to revolutionize the way healthcare is provided and consumed. It’s not going to take away doctors completely, or hospitals, or clinics, but it is going to change the industry into a new landscape.
For example, AI is going to fast-track radiology. AI can now look at Computed Tomography (CT) scans, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans, etc. It can spot if there is something wrong in the scan. When there is something wrong, certain AI solutions can already say what is wrong, and share the measurements of what is wrong for diagnosis.
And when people get sick, they can have a whole big data analytics capability based on AI and machine learning that actually look at all the people in the world like them with the same genetic background, and see what treatment works for the kind of person.
If you look at who has invested in startups and AI the most up till now, you have three main landscapes: the US, Israel, and China. We believe China is going to be at the forefront of AI.
In the US, it is more difficult to implement AI solutions. In order to have all hospitals implement AI-based radiology solutions, you need to actually take down the existing infrastructure. It is difficult to break down the existing infrastructure and build a new one in its place.
But take China for example. First of all, China is huge, and mostly communicates in one written language, which creates a huge amount of data that can be centralized on a platform. In contrast, in the US, the data is spread across different states, different systems, under different ownership. In Europe, there are different languages with completely different systems between countries.
